Setting out to process point clouds, why would I choose PDAL? What is different from LAStools, or PCL, or libLAS, or LASpy, or lidR? Or why not commercial offerings like Terrasolid?
My story was ridiculously simple: I needed to process some LAS 1.4 files, had no budget to buy LAStools, and PDAL was there.
PDAL's pipeline functionality and flexibility was the reason I stayed, along with the emergence of Entwine, a point cloud management approach that is closely integrated with PDAL and provides lossless, visualisation-and-data-query-ready data organisation.
In more recent times I've deployed PDAL to do routine point data processing, develop QA tools for hydrographic data, build scaleable tooling for forest canopy metrics, and help power utility companies make sense of their pole and line data. You can read all about those adventures here: https://www.spatialised.net/category/pdal/ - but not now!
The key design points for PDAL are described here: https://pdal.io/about.html
Discussion! What's your favourite LiDAR processing tool? And why?
Why are you interested in PDAL?